These metrics provide a balanced view of IT performance to IT stakeholders including the board of directors, C-level executives and other business leaders. As simple as these metrics may seem, they require a fairly high degree of IT management and process maturity to capture and report the data and perform at a high level.

The second metric explicitly measures and communicates the value of IT investments by looking at the cumulative return of the entire portfolio as illustrated below (see Figure 2). This view is generated by sorting all projects in the portfolio by their net present value (NPV) in descending order.

For a description of the other four metrics see Forrester, The Five Essential Metrics for Managing IT by Craig Symons